Perhaps you've come across the dire warnings on the Internet:
"HIGH ALERT!! REPORTS ARE COMING FROM EVERYWHERE PEOPLE!! RED ALERT
** HOSPITALS JAMMED AS BANNED PESTICIDE IS SPRAYED FROM THE SKIES
(formerly on
http://home.earthlink.net/~ravenlmr/index2.htm.)

What's all this about, you ask? It's called "Chemtrails," a
purported government program to deliver poisonous or mind-controlling
substances to the general population by spraying from airplanes.

At just over 50 seconds into the segment, Investigative Reporter Jeff Ferrell says

"KSLA News 12 had the sample tested at a lab. The results: A high level
of barium, 6.8 parts per million, (ppm). That's more than three times the
toxic level set by the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA."

The Problem? The actual video clearly shows 68.8 ug/L (stands for MICROGRAMS PER LITER),
eg 68.8 ppb (STANDS FOR PARTS PER BILLION). A Liter of water is 1000 grams, or 1 kilogram.
Just as 1+1=2, so does a millionth of a gram out of one thousand grams correspond to one
part per Billion. And so does 68.8 millionths of a gram per liter correspond to 68.8 parts per BILLION.

The reporter was not off by a factor of 1000, but only 100 instead, but only because he read the "68.8" as "6.8".
So Ferrell only over-estimated the amount of barium in the test report by a factor of 100 (or, 10,000 PER CENT if you
prefer percentages).

"The EPA has set a limit of 2.0 milligrams of barium per liter of
drinking water (2.0 mg/L), which is the same as 2 ppm [parts per million]."

The reporter got it wrong. The test result was not "three times the
toxic level set by the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA." (i.e. 300%).
It was actually less than 3.5%. It was around 30 times LESS THAN THE EPA'S TOXIC LIMIT.

The Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) site for October 13, 2004
shows a striking picture of contrails over the southeastern United
States. The site is full of incredibly inflammatory statements, such
as "The exhaust of an airplane engine can create a contrail by
saturating the surrounding air with extra moisture." (Actually,
the comments are seen as inflanmmatory only by believers in
"chemtrails," supposed government spraying of biotoxins and
death via seemingly innocent "contrails.")

Our local "chemtrails" enthusiast, Cliff Carnicom of Santa Fe, has
announced on his website that "NASA has recently adopted a public
strategy of abusing its position of national and public service by
attempting to indoctrinate the citizens, including children, that the
aerosol operations are a "normal" and expected consequence of daily
life and aircraft. Nothing can be further from the truth, as is also
apparent from an honest and thorough examination of the issue.
..."

Contrails
("CHEMTRAILS") are
NORMAL.
The International Space Station crew sees them all the time,
except when airplanes are not flying, as happened in the days
after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Here is the report
from www.space.com from September
14th, 2001:

"Three days after suicide airplane hijackers toppled the World
Trade Center in New York and slammed into the Pentagon in Washington,
D.C., the station crew noted an obvious absence of airborne
jetliners from their perch 240 miles (384 kilometers)
above Earth. 'Ill tell you one
thing thats really strange: Normally when we go over the U.S.,
the sky is like a spider web of contrails,' U.S.
astronaut and outpost commander Frank Culbertson told flight
controllers at NASAs Mission Control Center in Houston. 'And
now the sky is just about completely empty.
There are no contrails in the
sky,' he added.
'Its very, very
weird.' 'I hadnt thought of that
perspective,' fellow astronaut Cady Coleman replied."

Chris Lydgate of the Willamette Week (Oregon) wrote a detailed
report on Sept. 26th, 2001 on the "CHEM TRAIL" phenomenon. Lydgate
wrote about Portland observers of the "Chemtrails," and even New
Mexico's own Cliff
Carnicom (see http://www.nmsr.org/chemtrls.htm).
He also included comments from an old-timer meteorologist who puts
the kibosh on the "Trails." He wrote "If there is a giant
conspiracy to spray chemicals from the sky, chances are good that
Professor John Day is not a part of it. The author of six books on
meteorology, Day is a world-renowned expert on clouds, a professor
emeritus at Linfield College and a regular contributor to the
McMinnville News-Register, ... When he hears the word 'chemtrail,'
however, Day's frosty mustache droops, and his sky-blue eyes darken.
'I don't happen to warm up to that phenomenon,' he sighs. Despite his
reluctance to be drawn into the controversy, Day graciously agreed to
examine photographs of chemtrails to see if he spotted anything
unusual. 'This is a perfectly normal situation with cirrocumulus
cloud and a single spreading contrail,' he declared after inspecting
one photo for a full minute. Then he flipped to the next. 'Nothing
weird about that. Cirrostratus cloud...' And the next. 'The
criss-cross pattern is a consequence of planes flying criss-cross
patterns....' And the next. 'I've seen many situations like this
one....' Contrail formation, Day explained, depends on the relative
humidity of the atmosphere-- he ratio of what is to what could be at
a particular temperature. When relative humidity is low, contrails
dissipate within seconds. But when relative humidity is high,
especially at the subzero temperatures of the upper atmosphere, the
addition of even a tiny amount of water vapor acts as a catalyst.
Under these conditions, contrails may linger and spread to cover the
whole sky. ...At length, Day extracted from his bookshelf a
well-thumbed edition of Peterson's Field Guide to Clouds and Weather,
which he co-authored in 1991 (a good 10 years before chemtrails
became widely discussed), turned to the section on contrails, and
pointed to a photograph of a thick, white plume--a plume that looked
for all the world like a chemtrail..."

Source: http://www.wweek.com/flatfiles/News1982.html

USA Today
takes on CHEMTRAILS!

If you see a contrail from a plane, does that mean that the
government is again spraying deadly chemicals or biological agents on
its citizens? A 7 March 2001 article by Traci Watson in
USA Today describes the "chemtrail" phenomenon. She
quotes Patrick Minnis of NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton,
VA, who said "If you try to pin these people down and refute
things, it's, 'Well, you're just part of the conspiracy ... Logic is
not exactly a real selling point for most of them.'' Watson also
writes that "The cloud-forming contrails that conspiracy theorists
find so ominous are 'perfectly natural,' Minnis says. The odd grid
and parallel-line patterns are easily explained as contrails blown
together by the wind, scientists say. "

CONTRAILS
IN HISTORY! Did long contrails (now called
"chemtrails") exist in the 40's? You bet!! See RESOURCE NOTES
ON JET CONTRAILS AND ASSOCIATED ITEMS: http://www.astro.ku.dk/~holger/IDA/notes.html
! This site has a HUGE number of links to
every aspect of contrails.